MARLO DAVIDELIZABETH HOFFMANN

women to make those decisions on their own, and not tojudge for them or judge their character based on some sortof behavior or outfit they have on.”“I think about my nieces, who are four and five and ahalf, and the kind of world I want them to grow up in,” saysGay. “I think about how various pop culture artifacts willshape how they see themselves and how they move throughthe world. That perspective really helps me make decisionsabout what I will consume.”But Halliday, Gay, and Marlo David agree that a key toworking through those questions is media literacy. David,an associate professor of English and women’s, gender, andsexuality studies (WGSS), often asks herself who an imageis intended for, and “Who profits from it? Your body isyours. What you want to do with it is yours. But who makesthe money, and for whose consumption is it?”

The good mother

David is interested in cultural ideas of motherhood.

“We have many social and economic but also emotional
or affective ideas about what a good mother should be:
feminine, sweet and nurturing, sacrificial, doting, there
for her children—but not too much. She should be married
and also make a certain amount of money, or live in a
family that does,” she says.

In Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politicsof Transgression, the book David published this fall, sheexplores mothers who intentionally subvert this descriptionin some way, in order to ask, “Would it be possible for usto change what it means for us to be a mother—to changethose ideas or think about them differently or to identifywomen differently through their relationship to those kindsof norms?”David links her research on motherhood with questionsof reproductive justice—because the politics underneathreproductive justice are so closely tied with what we thinka good family looks like, and how we want to see ourselvesas a nation. And reproductive health and justice areconsistently major issues for feminists, serving asthe backdrop to our political conversation, especially atthis moment.

“I’m concerned about the consistent rollback of access
to reproductive health, attacks on Planned Parenthood,
and the singular focus on abortion, as if there are no
other reproductive issues one should be concerned about,
whether general sex education, women’s health, birth
control, and environmental racism,” says David.

The working mother

A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center shows that the
U.S. is the only one of 41 industrialized nations without
paid parental leave. A lack of affordable childcare in the
U.S. is also a barrier for mothers who want to work. Patricia